For the last few weeks we enjoyed a much better content on kbin than we had on reddit for a long time.
But it is coming to an end as more and more people will be leaving reddit for kbin. With them the trolls, the spammers and the ultrapoliticized americans. They want to push their ideology and there are legions of them.
Even though kbin is not american anymore, the sheer numbers and obsession of american people with their politics will quickly outnumber any other content here. The voting system will make your post about pertinent news sink to the bottom of the frontpage. Lost under the "Trump he said/she said" routine. The same thing that happened on reddit will happen on kbin: people will come for the politics and then spread in others magazines for a quick, uninteresting meme reply.
The articles on the web are still designed to infuriate the readers, so they react and create free ragecontent, and they will do it here. They will get infuriated here, just the same as they did on reddit. This mechanics hasn't changed by changing platform.
The NSFW content is coming, the political memecontent is coming, making the idea of federating this instance with any respectable other pole of interest impossible. If we are to name the federations, this one will become the greentext type of federation. Not a dangerous anarchist federation but certainly a pariah one.
That's why if you really are interested into discussing with people, you would be very well inspired to do it on another instance than kbin.social. Do it on a local instance, where the news are directed by people of your geographical region. Your default instance can only be a regional one, I can't see a global instance like "kbin.social" being not raided by americans with a political agenda. But they won't step a foot in madrid.social or berlin.social. In a sense it's even better if kbin.social can polarize and hold the kind of population which is hypnotized by number and popularity. The right usage of the fediverse should be to pick a local instance near you and only subscribe to niche magazines in different instances based on your specific needs.
The fediverse project will be tested with very high numbers of users now, and I don't think that the implicit federation model which is to accept everything by default and block some will survive the waves of political trolls. The federations will split and specialize, and will defederate en masse. The most sought after federations will become the technology ones, which will probably become picky on the creation of random magazines, like news and politics, since it attracts the worst in content creators. The kbin.social experiment will lead to a more strict moderation model in other instances and probably different way to count votes. I don't think that kbin.social will ever come back from being a perpetual testbench of a social platform.
So don't fall in love with your account on kbin, instead you should get ready to jump to another instance which will inevitably open on a server near you.
Jim?